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The Revocable Death of Adam Warlock

When Jim Starlin took over the Adam Warlock project in the mid-seventies, he turned the concept into something that made a reputation. In earlier hands, Warlock had appeared as a sometimes-silly, sometimes-sacreligious figure who occasionally underwent comic-book crucifixions to save the denizens of a duplicate Earth on the far side of the sun; the palpable pretention of his role of Messiah with Muscles might have inclined some editors to quietly escort the character out the back door and hope that no one remembered him.

Like few comics creators actually do, Starlin actually broke new ground for the medium. The entire sequence of plans and counter-plans involved Warlock in a moral quandary. Not like "relevant" comics, where the moral problem had to relate to current events and changing mores in society, nor like a subset of the relevant comic, where superheroes fought against straw men who represented simplified and caricaturish proponents of unfashionable and discredited ethos once accepted as mainstream; no, Warlock himself delved thoroughly into compromise and corruption in situations where he had to balance evil against evil. Starlin created a tale more akin to Greek tragedy, where the protagonist, due to a character flaw, must inevitably move forward to his own destruction.

The very serious ethical dilemmas represented in this work, simply put, made earlier superheroic ventures into theoretical metaphysics look puerile and innocent. Starlin dragged the reader through a long and tragic process where Warlock damned himself to save the universe.

The Corruption of Warlock

Starlin, however, knew what to do with him. First, Starlin faced him against an evil universal church (which probably represented Starlin's view of the Vatican, played out on a galactic scale). This church enjoyed as its head an evil patriarch who devoured worlds with warfare and tyrranized hundreds of other planets. At this point, the story might have lapsed into something simplistic: Noble counterculture messiah contends against evil status quo false messiah.

Into this mixture, Starlin infused an element that would receive much overuse in subsequent comics stories. Yet, considering Warlock's earlier messianic pretentions, the revelation of this anti-messiah - the Magus - representing a future version of Warlock himself infused considerable irony into the Warlock-as-Messiah concept. Starlin didn't stop there, though; in the machinations of Magus-versus-Warlock, each new conflict seemed just another phase in Magus' plan to corrupt Warlock, who, in his warring against his future self, abandoned all of his principles and pretentions to the goal of preventing his evolution into the galaxy- spanning figure who roundly believed in the inevitability of his own victory.

Warlock's compromises stripped away from him everything by which he judged himself fit to wield his considerable powers; and in his campaign against the Magus, he sunk to the point that he enlisted the aid of the genocidal demigod Thanos, who would ultimately destroy the few friends that remained to him. Warlock seemingly defeated the Magus by travelling to a year in the future, where his life would ebb low, then stealing his own soul with the vampiric soul gem set in his brow; and when he reached his near-future self, he found a willing victim. (One may speculate that part of his decision to willingly allow his past self to kill him depended upon his dubious view of the Magus' choice of coiffures; perhaps Adam simply could not live with the idea of wearing that afro).

Adam Dies

The story, at this point, would establish Starlin's reputation, and, as well, begin his sideline career as Official Slayer of Super-Heroes in later projects in which he would kill off Marvel's Captain Marvel and DC's second Robin, Jason Todd. As he left the story, readers could, with some certainty, note that Adam had died and now occupied a cemetary plot somewhere; they could, furthermore, expect this passing on to remain fairly free from subsequent revocation in a manner then without precedent in the industry, with the possible exception of the somewhat odd demise of the original Doom Patrol. Starlin even managed to graft something of a happy ending on it by recasting the corrupting and vampiric soul gem as a heavenlike place once a soul entered it, so that Adam Warlock might walk into the sunset with his deceased friends Pip the Troll and Gamora the assassin.

Comics from the same season would, however, foreshadow Marvel's chronic inability to leave a hero dead, for not long after his presumed death in his own books and in Avengers Annual #7, Warlock made a brief return. We can say about this return, with all charity, that it served to tie up loose ends with the Thanos storyline (said demonic demigod escaped after mortally wounding Warlock) and, furthermore, involved less than a page in which Adam came back to the "real" world from the world within his soul gem. Marvel Team-Up featured a story in which Spider-Man and the Thing had to race into space to rescue the Avengers (and the universe) from Thanos, who instead of fleeing, had simply stepped out a moment or two before going to town on the mid-seventies Avengers infesting his giant star-exterminating spaceship.

Adam therefore came out of the soul gem as a flaming avatar-thing that solved the Thanos problem for some time by turning said being to a statue. This had the further beneficial effect of allowing Marvel a respite for a few years from really universe-destroying threats involving Gods of Death, Cosmic(k) Messiahs, and Protectors of the Universe.

You Knew It Couldn't Last

Comics readers already knew that the medium would play light with death, especially for the villain who had to lose by page 20 but needed to come back at least once or twice a year to harry his favorite hero. They also knew the fake death story where a hero appeared to die. To refute both of these cliches, Marvel had allowed Jim Starlin definitively to deep-six Adam Warlock, and later his cosmic(k) peer Captain Marvel.

But...

After an admirable span lasting over thirteen years, the same time Marvel had left Wonder Man dead, Marvel brought about a cosmic mega-crossover event that centered around Adam Warlock.

Unfortunately, or intentionally, Starlin had left an escape hatch by sending Warlock into a contrived "heaven" within his soul gem. A comics death lawyer, by today, would easily recognize this as a likely mechanism whereby a subsequent writer might cavalierly revoke the earlier death of a superhero, although comics, and Marvel especially, seem well able to apply considerable ingenuity (and illogic) to the task of reviving a character they killed off and pretended to intend to leave dead.

Wonder Man remained dead about twelve years, and Jean Grey about six. Marvel's Revocable Death Department probably felt they had paid more dues than necessary by waiting so long to bring Warlock back, so, returning to Jim Starlin as writer, they published The Infinity Gauntlet, an overblown cosmic(k) saga in which vying superpowerful beings, including the Magus and Thanos and a multitude of personified abstract concepts attempt to bring about or prevent each other's mastery of the universe entire.

In this work, Warlock's resurrection stands as perhaps one of the least improbable and overblown components. Consider half of the population of the universe (evidently selected at random) disappearing; consider every superbeing on earth suddenly acquiring an evil doppelganger; consider big fight scenes with every superhero at Marvel's disposal getting out in outer space and duking it out with confusing and variable factions and too many of Marvel's cosmic(k) characters, such as Moondragon and Drax the Destroyer.

Naturally enough, the story would also require a new "Protector of the Universe" in the form of Quasar, whose powers closely resemble those of a Green Lantern, albeit with a different color of palpable energy; Quasar would serve in the capacity of Captain Marvel, while attempting to appeal to a readership that needed heroes about 22 years old even if they had appeared in comics for over 14 (if death doesn't work, why should time?).

Furthermore, this tale could not call itself complete without at least one instance of Adam Warlock becoming "The Supreme Being;" the earlier messianic claptrap that overblew his earliest stories naturally had undergone some inflation, requiring Adam to become God at least once per saga.

If Adam had lost the drive of the version we enjoyed in "The Strange Death of Adam Warlock," if nothing remained of the ex-messiah brought to the ultimate degradation in order to prevent a catastrophic demonic rebirth of his person, and if Adam Warlock would no longer grapple with difficult ethical questions centered around Kafkaesque dual binds as he had in the seventies, we can say this much: at least his future self had found a better hairdresser.

What Brings Him Low

When Adam Warlock died in Avengers Annual #7, he had reached the point of no return for key aspects of his character. His death resolved an ethical quandary surrounding his compromised ideals, fading sanity, and increasing corruption that he bore after each new bargain with the Devil for some new Pyrrhic victory.

Other characters did not inherently lose their depth with resurrection; Wonder Man actually gained some. The treatment of Jean Grey's rebirth involved serious pollution of the character's history, but that resulted from too much accumulated continuity and the attempt to integrate too many incompatible timelines; it need not have tainted her character if writers had not allowed it. The Human Torch's return from "death" affected his character little beyond the obligatory reverie about failing to fit into a "world he never made" that typified too many Marvel characters over the years.

In Warlock's case, however, his resurrection essentially ruined the character, since his death represented an inevitable development of his history and personality. The Adam Warlock that emerged from the soul gem has a title and duties and occasionally muses about death and entropy and the like; he sometimes serves as an arbiter in matters cosmic(k); but he lacks the endearing and enduring element of tragedy that Starlin so admirably created the first time and ultimately undid.